


The Branches of the World Tree

by Feneris



Category: Gravity Falls, Transcendence AU - Fandom
Genre: Adventures, Alternate Universe - Transcendence, Cats, Cats Killing Cute Creatures, Gen, Getting Lost, Trans-Dimensional World Trees, Yggdrasil - Freeform, warnings for:
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-15
Updated: 2016-03-15
Packaged: 2018-05-26 21:13:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6256096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Feneris/pseuds/Feneris
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It all started with one of David and Sarah's cats. Skitz had been leaving dead griffins on their front porch for weeks now, and for the life of them, David and Sarah couldn't figure out where he was getting them.</p><p>They were not prepared however, to discovered that Yggdrasil had been more aptly named than anyone had ever realized.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Branches of the World Tree

It had all started with the decapitated body of a teacup griffin showing up on their porch one morning. It was no mystery as to what was responsible. The cats, the eternal bane of small animals everywhere. Why they thought they had to leave pieces of their meals where humans could find them, neither David or Sarah really knew. 

It was also no mystery as to which cat of theirs was responsible. Skitz, was a short-haired brown tabby with a white belly and socks, and a predisposition for trouble. All their cats were mousers, with the notable exception of Terror, but Skitz was the only one of them who fancied himself as a “mighty hunter.” Anything smaller than himself was automatically considered fair prey. Thankfully he had learned early on to leave the pixies, and other fae alone. But beyond that, there were few things he wouldn’t hunt. He would douse himself in the rain barrel in order to take on the fire-breathing finches that patronized the backyard bird feeder. (The spark swallows still gave him trouble though.) Every month Sarah would clean the dismembered remains of at least twelve different species of woodland animals from the rafters of the garden shed. 

He had even picked a fight with a bald eagle once. The eagle for its part had nearly disemboweled him. Whether it was gods or demons watching over him, Skitz hadn’t been killed outright by the enraged bird. His right ear had been torn to ribbons, and he still had raggedy patches of fur which hid numerous rough scars, but he survived. Even though it had cost both David and Sarah nearly a thousand dollars to have the vet sew him back together. 

David’s course of action when he first found the dead griffin, had been to surreptitiously drop the body into the septic lagoon and shut up about it. A course of action Sarah silently approved of. Teacup griffins were pets. Humans had long been breeding them for both friendliness and cuteness. As a result, your average teacup griffin had all the survival instincts of a bottle of ketchup. Teacup griffins weren’t wild, and were regarded by all wild predators as the feathered equivalent of popcorn. It was more than likely that Skitz had killed someone’s pet, and neither David nor Sarah wanted to deal with the fallout. Especially after the incident with the Glenston’s chihuahua. 

\---

The Glenston’s chihuahua had been one of those little dogs who are under the oblivious misconception they are big tough canines. This particular chihuahua had gotten into the habit of wandering up and down the roads of town, generally making a pest out of itself. The Glenston’s neighbors all hated the dog for one reason or another, and to the Glenston’s credit they had fenced off their yard in an attempt to keep their dog from wandering. 

Too bad it didn’t work. As impressive as the new fence was, it had done nothing to stop the dog from sneaking out to strut proudly down the roads as if it wasn’t the same size as most of the prey animals in the area. Everyone agreed that it was only a matter of time until that little dog got scooped up by some wild animal looking for a quick snack. Instead, what ended up happening was the dog going farther than was its usual custom, and wandering right into David and Sarah’s property. 

Now this particular chihauhau liked to chase cats, and when it saw Terror napping on the front porch it had charged up the driveway howling and barking. Terror had cracked one eye open, saw the dog charging towards him, and watched with smug amusement as it ran smack into the wards David had placed around the front porch to keep wild animals from coming into the house through the cat flap. 

The dog had been confused and furious, howling and yapping in outrage. Terror had gone back to sleep. After nearly half-an-hour of fruitless barking, the dog had then gone off to find another cat to chase. Unfortunately, the next cat the chihuahua had come across had been Skitz. Skitz, who had just had the last of his stiches taken out last week, had been in no mood to put up with any small animal trying to chase him for sport. After the bald eagle, a chihuahua was nothing.

David, who had been napping on the couch, was woken up to the sound of a small dog howling in pain and terror. 

Skitz didn’t end up killing the dog, but he did maul it pretty good. David and Sarah had driven the dog down to the vet, and ended up offering to pay the bill when the Glenstons showed up. (Another thousand dollars down the tube.) Thankfully the Glenstons had accepted the olive branch for what it was, and had refrained from pressing charges or starting a vendetta over the incident. Still, they hadn’t exactly forgiven David and Sarah for the part Skitz had played in mauling their dog half to death. Which David and Sarah considered understandable under the circumstances.

\---  
When the second dead teacup griffin had appeared on the porch five days later, David and Sarah started to get worried. One dead pet, and by extension one enraged owner, was bad enough. But two? So again David had tossed the tiny body into the septic lagoon, and the two of them had pretended nothing had happened. 

After a fifth tiny carcass appeared on the welcome mat, David and Sarah both agreed that they couldn’t ignore this anymore. Quietly they began to ask around town if anyone was missing a pet griffin. Sarah asked around at the supernatural library and the Gravity Falls historical reenactment club, while David questioned the people at the museum and the Temple of the Dreamers’ Star. To their quiet surprise, no one was. 

So they kept their ears open, watching around for any sign someone was missing what was now up to ten fully grown teacup griffins. Yet the expected call for help never came. 

Then one morning they woke up to find the front porch awash in brightly colored feathers, along with the dismembered remains of what David estimated was between seven and ten teacup griffins. It was then that Sarah had suggested that the lost pet theory might need to be revised. 

So they sat down and brainstormed, coming up with three plausible theories. One, that folks had been letting loose a lot of teacup griffins into the forests of Gravity Falls, and that Skitz was picking off a rapidly diminishing flock. (It wouldn’t have been the first unwanted pet to be abandoned around their property.) Two, that teacup griffins could actually survive in the wild and there was a colony somewhere in the woods that Skitz was preying on. And three, that there was an illegal breeding operation somewhere in Gravity Falls and Skitz was preying on the animals which happened to escape. Either way, it was either a massive animal abuse case, a scientific curiosity, or an invasive pet problem waiting to happen. They needed to tell someone. 

The clerk on desk at the Gravity Falls fish and wildlife service had been taken aback when Sarah had shown up at the office, and dropped a garbage bag filled with thirty-three dead griffins onto his desk. 

\---

The forests of Gravity Falls were some of the most magical and mysterious places in the world. They were also some of the most unexplored and dangerous. At ground zero when the transcendence rewrote reality, the wooden areas often the site of phenomena that were strange and mysterious even by the standards of the post-transcendence world. If they had ever been mapped in the days before the transcendence, those maps were now grossly obsolete. The forest seemed to shift its dimensions and layout seemingly on its own whims and to date had defied all attempts to map it. 

That there was a previously undiscovered colony to teacup griffins in the woods was plausible enough to be worth investigating. Of course, with the forest’s reputation, a colony of multi-colored, floating manatees would also be plausible enough to warrant investigation. In any case there were teams of conservation officers and wildlife biologists prowling through the woods looking for any sign of wild teacup griffins. 

Ironically enough they did find a colony of floating manatees, along with a previously unknown nest of venomous wyverns, two hives of emotion-sensitive wasps, and a new species of carnivorous berry bush. However, the only griffins of any size they found anywhere, were the ones turning up dead on David and Sarah’s front porch. 

One of the conservation officers got the idea to tag Skitz with a magical tracker. Skitz had not been amused by this development, and had delivered upon the front porch the next day, three dead shrews, two decapitated sparrows, four squirrel tails, the entrails of at least five mice, and half a rabbit. Along with the usual offering of three dismembered teacup griffins. To add insult to injury the trackers showed that he had never left the property all week. Still the dead griffins kept showing up.

A few people had accused David and Sarah of feeding the griffins to their cats themselves. Saner heads pointed out that it still raised the question as to where _they_ were getting the griffins. You couldn’t just buy teacup griffins in bulk. Even if you could the amount of dead ones turning up on the front porch would cost far more than two museum researchers could afford. Cats could manifest magical powers, but conjuration wasn’t one of them. Invisibility and teleportation, yes. But conjuring small animals to murder, no. Eventually the searchers gave up and went home, accepting somewhere in their minds that the mystery would remain a mystery. 

Then Sarah came up with a very simple idea. One night her and David climbed up on the roof, got out the enchanted night-vision binoculars, and watched Skitz as he did his nightly rounds. He still had the magical tracker on him so they could still know his location, even when he ducked out of their sight. 

Sure enough they watched him vanish into the hedge, and come out a few minutes later with a twitching feathery body in his mouth. Back and forth he went, five times in total. A dead griffin is his mouth each time. 

\---  
David and Sarah had the most expensive hedge in all of Oregon. After saving their house and garden from being overrun by Yggdrasil, a supernatural plant that was usually extremely rare, they had redirected the magical currents of the area so that the greater part of the flow circled around their property. This allowed them to continue to siphon magical energy for their wards, without creating the magical conditions that promoted Yggdrasil growth. 

What they had not anticipated was the Yggdrasil to start growing again. This time along the edges of their property, following the new path of the magical currents. This time however, it didn’t make any moves to try and take over their property. On those grounds, David and Sarah agreed to let it live, or rather, decided it was too much of a pain to bother with. However, as the Yggdrasil grew, it stopped being an invasive pest and started resembling a maintenance free fence around their property. They were actually quite proud of it now, though they would never admit it out loud. 

The teacup griffins must have been nesting in the hedge the two of them reasoned. While Skitz was probably treating the colony like an all-you-could-eat buffet, it was likely that the hedge provided both a ready source of food and protection from most predators. “Most” being the operative word there. Neither David or Sarah could blame the search crews for overlooking the hedge. The whole mess was at least eight feet tall and nearly two meters wide in some places. As the tendrils had grown up, they turned from small green vines, into thick woody branches studded with five inch thorns. Those branches tangled together creating a thick briar that put military-grade barbed wire fences to shame. 

“We’ll get some machetes out of the shed tomorrow,” Sarah suggested. “Hack our way in there, and see if we can find the nests. Once we do we can ward them off or something. Keep Skitz from leaving dead griffins on our porch every morning.”

The next day, after they had fed the cats, they each got a pair of machetes and some thick gloves out of the garden shed and began hacking through the hedge at the spot where they saw Skitz emerge. At the time they were more worried about getting slashed by the thorns, pecked by angry griffins, or having to deal with whatever “presents” Skitz left them, when he found out they had warded off his favorite hunting site. 

\---

Dr. Meera Khatri was one of the world’s foremost experts in supernatural botany. Her main focus was on the magical plant Yggdrasil, which until recently had proven extremely difficult to research, due to the fact it was hard to find, and impossible to grow in the lab. That is until she received an email from a pair of housemates in Oregon, who claimed their house and garden were at risk of being overrun by the plant. 

When she had arrived at David and Sarah’s house, she discovered right away that they had not been exaggerating. Yggdrasil had been growing everywhere. While Dr. Khatri had originally been at a loss to explain the growth, her studies of David and Sarah’s property had suggested that Yggdrasil growth was tied to ambient magical energy. That hypothesis was subsequently confirmed, when David rearranged the flow of magic around the property, lowering the ambient magic levels and triggering a massive die-off of the Yggdrasil. It had also been the key to figuring out how to grow Yggdrasil in the lab, and her research had promptly taken off as a result. She had also made two new friends, and while she was not close to David and Sarah, she always made a point to stop by their place whenever she was passing through Oregon. 

In fact, the prospect of visiting the two of them had been on her mind as she made her way to one of the University of Toronto’s large greenhouses, where she grew Yggdrasil for her research. 

“How’s everything going?” she asked, pushing through the glass doors and addressing Mark, one of her grad students. 

“Good, but we’ve been getting some strange magic readings from the long-term growth patch though.” Mark replied. “Nothing really extreme, but odd all the same.” 

“You’re right,” Dr. Khatri agreed, glancing at the tablet Mark handed to her. “These are weird readings.” Frowning, she walked along the rows of growing plants to the plot set aside for what she called her “Long term growth study,” which basically involved leaving the plant alone and recording how it grew. At the moment that patch resembled the hedge that surrounded David and Sarah’s house. Thick woody branches studded with thorns. “Did you do confirmation readings with another scanner?” she asked, frowning again when Mark nodded. 

“Twice,” he confirmed. “Same readings each time.”

“Well, this could be nothing. But this is extremely magical flora we’re dealing with here. Literally anything is possible.” Another frown. This one directed at the tangled branches in front of her. “Maybe bring out...”

The blade of a machete suddenly cleaved through the branches in front of her, coming from _inside_ the twisted mass of thorny flora. A second machete blade hacked through some branches, followed by another blow from the first blade. Something was in the Yggdrasil and it was trying to get out. 

“Mark! Press the quarantine alarm!” Meera ordered, casting around frantically for something to use as a weapon. The closest thing was a garden rake, which she grabbed and brandished threateningly as the machete’s hewed away at the branches. A gloved hand suddenly reached out, pulled back the foliage, and Meera got her first good look at whatever was trying to get into her lab.

“David!? Sarah!?” 

“Dr. Khatri!?” 

David and Sarah stepped out of the hole they had hacked in the old-growth Yggdrasil and looked around the greenhouse in confusion. They looked like they had just come straight out of some kinds of magic wilderness. Their clothes were dirty and torn, they each carried a machete in their hands, and Sarah had the pelt of some kind of large horned primate wrapped around her shoulders. 

“Quick!” Sarah yelled, pulling her phone out of her coat pocket. “What’s the date?”

“Wha…!? July 5th 2237,” Dr. Khatri answered. 

“What kind of year? BC? AD? ACE? BT? PT? ARSL!?”

“2237 ACE,” Dr. Khatri answered, bewildered. 

“We’ve only lost two days,” David hissed to Sarah.

“That’s assuming we are where we think we are,” Sarah shot back. “Quick! Does the acronym XKOR mean anything to you?”

“What? No! I mean I don’t think so.” Dr. Khatri replied. “What are…?”

“What about the Hillfred Act? The night of the black cups? Have you ever worn yellow to a funeral? Have you ever heard the phrase Weirdmagedon? What about the second coming of Dipper Pines!?” 

“What the heck are you guys talking about?”

Sarah lurched forward, her face inches from Khatri’s. “How did we meet?”

“You had a problem with Yggdrasil overrunning your place. You emailed me to ask if I knew any way to get rid of it.” 

Sarah seemed to deflate with relief. “We’re in the right dimension.”

“Thank all the gods and demons,” David muttered. “If you don’t mind me asking? Where are we?”

“Toronto,” Meera answered. “In my lab at the university. Now it’s my turn for some questions. What are you two doing here? How did you even get inside this greenhouse, let alone the middle of an Yggdrasil bush?”

“It’s a long story,” David replied. “We’ll tell you everything, but first. Is there any place nearby we can have a shower?” 

\---

A trip to the university gymnasium changing rooms, and a cheap bar of soap, had both David and Sarah looking and feeling a lot better. Even if Sarah hadn’t abandoned the horned pelt she had wrapped around her shoulders. 

“So after we had hacked a sizable hole in the hedge, we stepped inside to take a look around. See if we could see any signs of griffins. It was like tumbling down the metaphorical rabbit hole and finding yourself in Wonderland,” Sarah explained over a cup of tea in Dr. Khatri’s office. 

“It’s literally a world tree,” David added. “Next thing we know we’re walking on branches under a multicolored sky. And the sound… I could tell when we crossed over because the whole sound of everything changed. It sounded kind of like wind-chimes and woodwind instruments actually.” 

“I really don’t know how to explain it,” Sarah admitted. “But what’s new there. We’ve been at a loss to explain a lot of things ever since the Transcendence happened. I guess the best way to say it, is that it was like walking along the branches of the world tree. We could see the vague outlines of a trunk and other branches, but beyond that, it was just too big to really get the scope. It’s like we can’t see the planet Earth from where we are standing right now. Didn’t help that pieces of the scenary seemed to fade in and out of existence.” 

“So the Yggdrasil we see growing now, are all just… branches?... of one big superorganism?” Dr. Khatri asked, glancing up from the notes she was writing down. If this was true, it looked like she was going to be publishing another paper, refuting her own arguments, again. 

“I guess,” David answered with a shrug. “We were more interested in figuring out how to get back than in taking down scientific data.” 

“Fair enough,” Meera shrugged. “But how did you get cut off from your original entry point.” 

“Well,” Sarah said with a glower. “We follow the branch we came in on, and we come to this large tree growing out of the bark. Some kind of parasite maybe. Anyway, there’s a whole flock of teacup griffins living in its branches. There must have been millions of them. It was a big tree. So we figure this is where Skitz must be getting all those griffins he’s been leaving on the front porch. So we put a ward up that we figure will keep Skitz from coming down this way to terrorize the griffins. We could actually walk all the way around the branch. Gravity seemed to pull towards it no matter which side you were walking on. Anyway, it didn’t take us long to get the ward up. Then, Mr. I Have a Good Sense of Direction and Besides We Won’t Go Far, suggests we do a little exploring while we’re here.” 

“As I recall,” David snipped back, “Mrs. Good Thing I Made a Map, We’ll Be Back Home Before You Know It, went along with it very enthusiastically and was ironically, not able to get us back home.”

“Long story short, we got lost,” Sarah admitted. “I don’t know exactly what happened, but we turn around to go back and suddenly the way back looks completely different. Every time we tried to retrace our steps, we just kept finding ourselves heading in a completely new direction. Eventually we gave up on backtracking and traveled out to the ends of one of the branches. We hack our way through the thorns, and next thing we know, we’ve walking out into some backwater farming village in Shang Dynasty China.”

“I _think_ it was Shang Dynasty,” David interrupted. “For all I know that could have been a post-apocalyptic universe trying to imitate a so called glorious past.” 

“In any case. We don’t speak the language, don’t know the culture, look and dress differently than anyone those people had ever seen. Anyway, some farmer tries to pick a fight with us and David shocked him with a lightning bolt. Apparently that was good enough evidence that we might be either gods, immortals or powerful sorcerers. So they start bringing out all this food and goods to try and appease us.”

“I wouldn’t have gone along with it, but at that point we realized we might need more than machetes if we wanted to get out of this,” David added. 

“Yes, so we took some food, a few skins of either very old fruit juice or extremely weak wine, a pair of wool coats, and a few bags and some other miscellaneous stuff. Muttered a few things we hoped would come across as thanks and headed back into the Yggdrasil the way we came. Anyway, so we find ourselves another branch, hack our way through the thorns at the end, come out into another time, place, and dimension, try not to get killed, make our way back to where we came out, then repeat the whole process with another branch.”

“If either of us say we want to go into politics, shoot us,” David interjected. 

“We ran into a dimension where we took over the world,” Sarah explained. “The less said about that, the better.”

“So you just scavenged food and supplies in the different dimensions you came out in?” Meera asked. 

“Actually, we didn’t need to worry too much about food or water,” Sarah admitted. “There was this fruit growing everywhere and we kept finding streams of water flowing down different branches. Here.” She reached into her bag and held up a yellow fruit. It looked like a peach in size and shape, except there was no fuzz and the whole thing was a bright golden yellow. “No pits or anything. We didn’t get sick from eating them. But, we didn’t know how safe it would be to keep eating them long term, so we tried to scavenge other, more familiar food, whenever we could.”

“I can have some of my colleges run some toxicology tests if you’re worried,” Dr. Khatri told them, just leave some samples with me before you leave. 

“Thank you,” Sarah replied with relief. “I just want to make sure neither of us are going to wind up with some kind of chronic poisoning because we ate strange fruits from a multi-dimensional world tree. Anyway, back on topic. We basically kept repeating the process until we hacked our way into your laboratory, which we’re now pretty sure is in the same dimension we came from.”

“You sure about that?” Meera asked, an eyebrow raised. 

“I just got several texts from my cousin Isa, asking in effect, ‘where the hell are you two? It’s been two days and no one has seen any sign of you. Your car was still in the garage when I drove up to check your house. I nearly lost my hand trying to retrieve your spare key. No one has fed your cats. Where the hell are you? I hope you haven’t got devoured by a demon or something,’ etcetera, etcetera. At the very least we’re in a place that bears a big resemblance to our home dimension, and which is missing us under similar circumstances.” 

“As far as we could discover, this is the only dimension where we booby trapped the flower pot we hid the spare key under.” David interjected. 

“Remind me not to visit whenever you’re not at home,” Meera muttered. “Anyway, have you two figured out how you’re going to get back to Gravity Falls?”

“Well, assuming our credit cards still work, I was thinking we’d just book the next flight to Portland and have Isa or someone pick us up at the airport,” Sarah replied, casting a confirming look at David who shrugged in semi-agreement.

“I’ve got a better idea,” Dr. Khatri suggested. “I was planning on coming over to visit you in Oregon anyway. You can stay over at my place for a few nights while I get everything together. Then you can drive out with me. You can give me a more detailed account of what happened, and when we get to your place I can officially confirm everything. That sound okay?”

“I’ll have to get Isa or someone to feed the cats and water the garden for us,” Sarah replied, glancing again at David.

“I’ll have to email my boss to tell him I’ll be missing some more work. But I’ve got time-off saved. Sounds good to me.” 

“Excellent,” Dr. Khatri smiled. “You’ll have to hang around the university until I’m done my lecture for today. But I’m free all afternoon.” 

“That’s fine,” Sarah answered. “We’ll need to give everyone a call to tell them where we are anyway.”

\---

Jack Heston, Head Curator of the Gravity Falls Museum, put down his phone. Isa Pines had just texted the entire town to tell them that the search had been called off, and that David and Sarah had finally surfaced in Canada of all places. 

That explained the email he had just gotten from David saying that him and Sarah had discovered a trans-dimensional portal in their hedge, and that he wouldn’t be able to make it to work until he got back from Toronto. 

Jack wasn’t terribly surprise. This was Gravity Falls. These things happened.

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so I've been wanting to expand on David and Sarah as OCs. Mostly as a way to explore the TAU universe in a way that's not directly connected to Alcor or any of the reincarnations. This fic in particular was to showcase some headcannons I had that might make Yggdrasil better fit its name in a way that doesn't completely contradict cannon, such that it is in TAU. 
> 
> However I also want to write things that people want to read. So I'm asking folks if there is anything in particular they want explored, or any ideas they have for David and Sarah? I'm currently seriously considering doing a fic exploring the supernatural powers of house cats. But I'm also want to do a fic where Sarah puts together the pieces linking Alcor the Dreambender to Uncle Dipper. I also have several semi-formed ideas along the themes of non-sexual intimacy, hobbies and social circles, as well as home and varying degrees of introversion.


End file.
